Today's consumers desire an easy to use laundry product with improved fabric care benefits,
including: improved softness, reduced fabric wrinkles, less mechanical damage during washing, less pills/fuzz, and less colour transfer or fading. Cationic polymers are known in the Art for providing improved fabric care, particularly softness and better fabric feel. Therefore, there is a strong desire to add these polymers to liquid compositions, including compact compositions, and unit dose liquid laundry articles.
As liquid laundry compositions become more and more compact, it is desirable to reduce or eliminate those ingredients that do not improve performance, including water. However, certain ingredients, such as cationic polymers are difficult to solubilise when little or no water is present. Also, these ingredients increase the composition viscosity to unacceptable levels at low water concentrations. Various means have been attempted to overcome this problem. Pre-dissolving the cationic polymer with low amounts of water leads to very viscous premixes that are difficult to process. WO 2007/107215 discloses a process whereby, a cationic cellulosic polymer is initially dissolved in water and optionally, a solvent. In addition, it has recently been discovered that for unit dose articles, cationic polymers can complex with the encapsulating water-soluble or dispersible film, which are generally anionically charged. This leads to poor film solubility.
Accordingly, a need remains for a means to stably incorporate such cationic polymers into non-aqueous liquid compositions. A need also remains, for a means of stably incorporate cationic polymers into liquid-comprising unit dose articles, without affecting the solubility of the enclosing film.